In 1962, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act hastened the process of South Asian migration to postcolonial Britain. Half a decade later, now is an opportune moment to revisit the accumulated writing about the diasporas formed through subsequent settlement, and to probe the ways in which the South Asian diaspora can be re-conceptualised. Writing the City in British Asian Diasporas takes a fresh look at such matters and will have multi-disciplinary resonance worldwide. The meaning and importance of local, multi-local and trans-local dynamics is explored through a devolved and regionally-accented comparison of five British Asian cities: Bradford, the East End of London, Manchester, Leicester and Birmingham. Analysing the ‘writing’ of these differently configured cities since the 1960s, its main focus is the significant discrepancies in representation between differently-positioned texts reflecting both dominant institutional discourses and everyday lived experiences of a locality. Part I offers a comprehensive, yet still highly contested, reading of each city’s archives. Part II examines how the arts and humanities fields of History, Religion, Gender and Literary/Cultural Studies have all written British Asian diasporas, and how their perspectives might complement the better-established agendas of the social sciences. Providing an innovative analysis of South Asian communities and their multi-local identities in Britain today, this interdisciplinary book will be of interest to scholars of South Asian Studies, Migration, Ethnic and Diaspora Studies, as well as Sociology, Anthropology, and Geography.

A unique compendium by an international team of contributers which opens up the reader to surprise twists of the imagination, new forms of criticism and to new ways of finding ourselves in fragments of the urban.

Writing London asks the reader to consider how writers sought to respond to the nature of London. Drawing on literary and architectural theory and psychoanalysis, Julian Wolfreys looks at a variety of nineteenth-century writings to consider various literary modes of productions as responses to the city. Beginning with an introductory survey of the variety of literary representations and responses to the city, Writing London follows the shaping of the urban consciousness from Blake to Dickens, through Shelley, Barbauld, Byron, De Quincey, Engels and Wordsworth. It concludes with an Afterword which, in developing insights into the relationship between writing and the city, questions the heritage industry's reinvention of London, while arguing for a new understanding of the urban spirit.

The Oxford Handbook of Southeast Asian Englishes is the first reference work of its kind to describe both the history and the contemporary forms, functions, and status of English in Southeast Asia (SEA). Since the arrival of English traders to Southeast Asia in the seventeenth century, the English language has had a profound impact on the linguistic ecologies and the development of societies throughout the region. Today, countries such as Singapore and the Philippines have adopted English as a national language, while in others, such as Indonesia and Cambodia, it is used as a foreign language of education. The chapters in this volume provide a comprehensive overview of current research on a wide range of topics, addressing the impact of English as a language of globalization and exploring new approaches to the spread of English in SEA. The volume is divided into six parts that investigate, respectively: historical and contemporary English contact in SEA; the structures of the Englishes spokes in different SEA nations; the English-language literatures of the region; approaches to English in education throughout the region; and resources for researching SEA Englishes. The handbook will be an invaluable reference work for students and researchers in areas as diverse as contact linguistics, English as a Foreign Language, world Englishes, and sociolinguistics.

This book is about the impact of literature upon cities world-wide, and cities upon literature. It examines why the city matters so much to contemporary critical theory, and why it has inspired so many forms of writing which have attempted to deal with its challenges to think about it and to represent it. Gathering together 40 contributors who look at different modes of writing and film-making in throughout the world, this handbook asks how the modern city has engendered so much theoretical consideration, and looks at cities and their literature from China to Peru, from New York to Paris, from London to Kinshasa. It looks at some of the ways in which modern cities – whether capitals, shanty-towns, industrial or ‘rust-belt’ – have forced themselves on people’s ways of thinking and writing.

Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding is an insightful, expert-led book which provides tourism students with a practice-based approach to producing researched literary travel writing on an urban destination, using the writing process as a research tool in itself. The book is scientifically supported with full academic references for researchers. On a global basis, city councils and destination managers are seeking new ways to commission and sponsor professional content authors as part of place-branding projects for tourism development. Given the increasing prevalence of such content within the tourism industry, this book provides a cohesive overview of literary travel writing, presenting it as an enquiry process that can be applied by writer-researchers to spaces that have value to them. Travel writing is presented as a methodological practice that researchers can learn and apply to their own projects, both in academic settings and in commercial city branding. Examples of literary travel writing are carefully examined throughout and their affects refracted through further work. Enriched with a wealth of case studies, chapters are presented in such a way that readers can take the work as a model for their own projects. This informative and practical volume will be of great interest to students of tourism marketing, destination marketing, place branding and travel writing, as well as current creators of commercial tourism marketing content.

Peter Ackroyd: The Ludic and Labyrinthine Text offers the reader the first major critical study in English of one of Britain's most inventive, playful and significant writers of the twentieth century. This study playfully, yet rigorously engages with these aspects of literary stylistics and personal and national identity so important in Ackroyd's work. Rejecting the postmodern label previously attached to the author, Gibson and Wolfreys provide a consideration of all Ackroyd's writing to date, from his poetry and critical thought, to his novels and biographies, offering an indispensable account to anyone interested in Ackroyd and the condition of the novel at the end of the twentieth century.

This encyclopaedia will be an indispensable resource and recourse for all who are thinking about cities and the urban, and the relation of cities to literature, and to ways of writing about cities. Covering a vast terrain, this work will include entries on theorists, individual writers, individual cities, countries, cities in relation to the arts, film and music, urban space, pre/early and modern cities, concepts and movements and definitions amongst others. Written by an international team of contributors, this will be the first resource of its kind to pull together such a comprehensive overview of the field.

The sixth edition of the highly successful The City Reader juxtaposes the very best classic and contemporary writings on the city to provide the comprehensive mapping of the terrain of Urban Studies and Planning old and new. The City Reader is the anchor volume in the Routledge Urban Reader Series and is now integrated with all ten other titles in the series. This edition has been extensively updated and expanded to reflect the latest thinking in each of the disciplinary areas included and in topical areas such as compact cities, urban history, place making, sustainable urban development, globalization, cities and climate change, the world city network, the impact of technology on cities, resilient cities, cities in Africa and the Middle East, and urban theory. The new edition places greater emphasis on cities in the developing world, globalization and the global city system of the future. The plate sections have been revised and updated. Sixty generous selections are included: forty-four from the fifth edition, and sixteen new selections, including three newly written exclusively for The City Reader. The sixth edition keeps classic writings by authors such as Ebenezer Howard, Ernest W. Burgess, LeCorbusier, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, and Louis Wirth, as well as the best contemporary writings of, among others, Peter Hall, Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, and Kenneth Jackson. In addition to newly commissioned selections by Yasser Elshestawy, Peter Taylor, and Lawrence Vale, new selections in the sixth edition include writings by Aristotle, Peter Calthorpe, Alberto Camarillo, Filip DeBoech, Edward Glaeser, David Owen, Henri Pirenne, The Project for Public Spaces, Jonas Rabinovich and Joseph Lietman, Doug Saunders, and Bish Sanyal. The anthology features general and section introductions as well as individual introductions to the selected articles introducing the authors, providing context, relating the selection to other selection, and providing a bibliography for further study. The sixth edition includes fifty plates in four plate sections, substantially revised from the fifth edition.

Treat summarizes the Japanese contribution to such ongoing international debates as the crisis of modern ethics, the relationship of experience to memory, and the possibility of writing history. This Japanese perspective, he shows, both confirms and amends many of the assertions made in the West on the shift that the death camps and nuclear weapons have jointly signaled for the modern world and for the future.